Arlanthe
2007-02-06, 07:08 AM
I developed an interesting illustration of natural selection, using dice, first used to explain the concept to a fence-sitting creationist.
Like many gamers, I have a sack of dice so large it could be used to bludgeon someone to death. I selected twenty of each type of die, all the same size, and put them in a plastic bucket that was formerly used to hold loose change. I asked the creationist “so what are the chances that I roll a one on all of these dice?” “Extremely small” she admitted. Her entire problem with evolution and natural selection was that it was “too random” and “improbable” that an organism adapt in a constructive way. That’s a fair point for a person who really doesn’t understand the concept.
I responded by saying asking, ”if we do something seemingly improbable now with these dice, maybe you’ll see that it is indeed possible”. She nodded skeptically. I cast all of the dice out on the table, and they tumbled out into a random pile of numbers. “Well, it looks like we didn’t do anything improbable that time”. There was nothing interesting or improbable about the numbers that were rolled. My mark smirked triumphantly. I told her to go ahead and have a go at rolling, and maybe something deceptively improbable will happen after all. So we continued chatting about the issue as she scooped up the dice and dumped them a fistful at a time into the bucket.
“Stop”, I said, when she was most of the way finished with putting the dice back into the bucket. We looked at the remaining dice on the table. There were 16 four sided dice, a couple of 6 siders, and maybe an eight sider or two. All of the 10, 12, and 20 sided dice were in the bucket. Over three quarters of the four sided dice were still on the table, comprising four-fifths of the remaining dice. Without even looking at what she was doing, blindly and randomly picking up dice and dumping them into the bucket, she had inadvertently illustrated natural selection to herself. It was the shape of the dice that was important (as with animals), not the numbers on the dice- those were just used as a foil. It was very statistically improbable that the remaining dice count would come out the way it did with all of the 10-sided and above dice ending up in the bucket, and most of the four siders “surviving”. Yet I was confident enough in what would happen to run this practical experiment. At that moment, realization dawned on her.
The four sided die is more “fit” to survive in an environment where fists are grabbing at dice. I went on to explain that there were minor (and sometimes major) mutations in all organisms, caused by chemical transcription error and radiation (among other things). This variation within a species provides the change necessary for evolution. Some of the “dice” species were pointier, and some were more bulbous. In a world where hand predators eat dice for food, the fewer sides you have, the more likely you will survive to pass on your genes. It is the same with all animals, I explained. Imagine that the dice are gazelles, and the hand is a tiger. In that analogy, the four sided dice would be the faster gazelles- less likely to get eaten by the tiger, which will most often catch the slower (easier to grip) dice/gazelles. So after many generations, the dice pool begins to look more liked a four sided die population (the gazelles evolve to become faster, longer legs, more efficient muscles, and so forth). The faster ones don’t get caught and breed other fast gazelles! The same selection pressure favored creatures with long necks who could breed more because they got leaves higher in the trees (giraffes), stealthier predators who hid better (tigers), and plants with stickier seeds that could spread them farther (burrs).
If you are slightly better than all of the other organisms of your type, it is easier for you to survive to pass your genes on and win! Then the future generations look more like you! After millions of years, a lot of generations can cause a lot of changes, and lead to some pretty interesting survival traits.
I am currently planning on taking this idea a step further by collecting six sided dice of the same size and weight, but varying roughness, and seeing how well the slicker members of the D6 species survive the hand-predator than rougher members of the species. I’d like to make an educational game out of some concepts like this to explain natural selection and evolution to school children, and people with a school-aged understanding of evolution.
Like many gamers, I have a sack of dice so large it could be used to bludgeon someone to death. I selected twenty of each type of die, all the same size, and put them in a plastic bucket that was formerly used to hold loose change. I asked the creationist “so what are the chances that I roll a one on all of these dice?” “Extremely small” she admitted. Her entire problem with evolution and natural selection was that it was “too random” and “improbable” that an organism adapt in a constructive way. That’s a fair point for a person who really doesn’t understand the concept.
I responded by saying asking, ”if we do something seemingly improbable now with these dice, maybe you’ll see that it is indeed possible”. She nodded skeptically. I cast all of the dice out on the table, and they tumbled out into a random pile of numbers. “Well, it looks like we didn’t do anything improbable that time”. There was nothing interesting or improbable about the numbers that were rolled. My mark smirked triumphantly. I told her to go ahead and have a go at rolling, and maybe something deceptively improbable will happen after all. So we continued chatting about the issue as she scooped up the dice and dumped them a fistful at a time into the bucket.
“Stop”, I said, when she was most of the way finished with putting the dice back into the bucket. We looked at the remaining dice on the table. There were 16 four sided dice, a couple of 6 siders, and maybe an eight sider or two. All of the 10, 12, and 20 sided dice were in the bucket. Over three quarters of the four sided dice were still on the table, comprising four-fifths of the remaining dice. Without even looking at what she was doing, blindly and randomly picking up dice and dumping them into the bucket, she had inadvertently illustrated natural selection to herself. It was the shape of the dice that was important (as with animals), not the numbers on the dice- those were just used as a foil. It was very statistically improbable that the remaining dice count would come out the way it did with all of the 10-sided and above dice ending up in the bucket, and most of the four siders “surviving”. Yet I was confident enough in what would happen to run this practical experiment. At that moment, realization dawned on her.
The four sided die is more “fit” to survive in an environment where fists are grabbing at dice. I went on to explain that there were minor (and sometimes major) mutations in all organisms, caused by chemical transcription error and radiation (among other things). This variation within a species provides the change necessary for evolution. Some of the “dice” species were pointier, and some were more bulbous. In a world where hand predators eat dice for food, the fewer sides you have, the more likely you will survive to pass on your genes. It is the same with all animals, I explained. Imagine that the dice are gazelles, and the hand is a tiger. In that analogy, the four sided dice would be the faster gazelles- less likely to get eaten by the tiger, which will most often catch the slower (easier to grip) dice/gazelles. So after many generations, the dice pool begins to look more liked a four sided die population (the gazelles evolve to become faster, longer legs, more efficient muscles, and so forth). The faster ones don’t get caught and breed other fast gazelles! The same selection pressure favored creatures with long necks who could breed more because they got leaves higher in the trees (giraffes), stealthier predators who hid better (tigers), and plants with stickier seeds that could spread them farther (burrs).
If you are slightly better than all of the other organisms of your type, it is easier for you to survive to pass your genes on and win! Then the future generations look more like you! After millions of years, a lot of generations can cause a lot of changes, and lead to some pretty interesting survival traits.
I am currently planning on taking this idea a step further by collecting six sided dice of the same size and weight, but varying roughness, and seeing how well the slicker members of the D6 species survive the hand-predator than rougher members of the species. I’d like to make an educational game out of some concepts like this to explain natural selection and evolution to school children, and people with a school-aged understanding of evolution.